Haiyan; Social vulnerability

Last week, I have shown that Typhoon with greater intensities will become more common. I will continue to talk about Haiyan, but with focus on the social aspect of the disaster. David Alexander (2006 p2) wrote “vulnerability is a greater determinant of disaster than hazards themselves”. I will explore how social vulnerability coupled with a strong Typhoon created this disaster.

Figure 1: The construct for the vulnerability of places (Source Cutter 1996)

The above diagram by Cutter explained how the vulnerability of places is measured. Starting from the left;

1. Risk interacts with Mitigation; risk being the probability of a hazard event (in this case a typhoon)
2. These two combines to produce the Hazard Potential
3. The Hazard Potential is either moderated or enhanced by a geographic filter (the site, situation of place and proximity), and a social filter
4. Social filter includes community experience with hazards, community ability to respond to/cope with/recover from/adapt to hazard which in turn is influenced by economic, demographic and housing characteristics.

Cutter has given a comprehensive list of  factors that would increase or decrease social vulnerability. I will explore some of these factors in relation to affected areas.

Figure 2: A population map of the Philippines (Source: OCHA 2013)

Population growth/Housing: 

• The path of the storm went very close to areas near of high population of. For example, the storm came very close to Tacloban and Cebu which have a population of over half a million people. This aerial footage shows most of the destroyed houses are made out of weak materials like wood and metal sheets, which made them very easily damaged.
• For example, both Tacloban and Cebu have a population growth rate of 2.16% and 1.94% respectively between 2000-2010. Coupled with poor housing and inadequate infrastructure, this exemplified the level of social vulnerability. 

Politics: 

• A blog post from the Monkey Cage with guest post from University of Michigan political scientist James Atkinson, Allen Hicken and Nico Ravanilla showed an interesting map (fig 3.) and they connected political incompetence with increased social vulnerability. 
• The misalignment between the location of storm exposure and reconstruction fund suggest that during Typhoon Haiyan some people were made more vulnerable due to their inability to rebuild from previous hazard events. This could contributed to an increase in vulnerability.

Figure 3: Storm exposure (left), reconstruction funds (right) by municipality in the Philippines (source)

Poverty: 

• This is one of the major factors that contribute to the social vulnerability of an area. Income is important as it increases the ability to absorb losses and increases family/person resilience to hazard impact. Comparing fig 4 to fig 2, we could see that the pathways of Typhoon directly passes through provinces that has at least 40% of its population living under the poverty line.

Fig 4: A map showing the percentage of population living below the poverty line in each province (source: WB 2013)

Not all doom and gloom

The Philippine government is working with UNISDR to deliver a programme called “SafeSchool campaign”. This is to reduce social vulnerability by targeting 48,000 public schools across the country to raise “public awareness, disaster preparedness and school education on disaster risk reduction”

A recent research done by Striessnig et al (2013) has shown that the single most important factor in reducing vulnerability to natural hazard is education and in particular female education. Surprisingly, the model also found no significance between reducing vulnerability and income if education is taken in account at the same time.  Therefore this might be the most efficient way to deal with social vulnerability. 

I have outlined some of the factors that exemplified the disaster. Even though the Philippines have multiple experiences of Typhoon, they were unprepared due to the inherent problem that exist within the country. Since social vulnerability is made up of multiple factors (the social vulnerability concepts and metrics table in cutter 1996) and by tackling one factor like education is simply not enough. Ultimately, if both the local and national government cannot run effectively and provide effective post-disaster response, reconstruction and mitigation project, social disorder is doomed to reoccur as seen from previous events in the Philippines.